The Fake Siri Backlash….
The old saying, “Give them an inch and they will take a mile,” sure does come to mind while reading Gizmodo’s Mat Honan’s piece about Siri.
The bottom line complaint that Mat Honan has is this: Siri is not as intelligent as a human being, is not perfect, does not understand what you say everytime, cannot always fully fathom what you mean or hint at, and therefore Apple is a liar and is perpetrating a fraud against its consumer base.
I exaggerate, if at all, only slightly.
According to Honan, Apple is in the business of delivering exquisite perfection when it releases its products: it did so every time with its previous products — with the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, and the hefty prices it charges for its product are well worth it — but with Siri, it has broken its Market Promise:
The iPod wasn’t the first music player, but it was the best; it was simple and wonderful. The iPhone was not the first smartphone, but it changed people’s lives in a way that hadn’t happened before; it was intuitive and powerful. The iPad was not the first of its kind, but I waited for the Cupertino Nod to buy a tablet. You know what? It was worth the wait too.
In contrast, according to Honan, Siri is a deeply flawed product:
If I wanted a half-baked voice control system, I could snag an Android phone for $49 at T-Mobile. Instead, I waited, and gladly plunked down hundreds of dollars on a new iPhone in October—because it promised to be flawless (or close enough), like everything before it.
The tagging of Siri as a “Beta” product for Honan is a senseless Marketing gimmick, totally beside the point, because “Beta is for Google”. Not sure what that means exactly, but one not-so-subtle implication is that the dumb public doesn’t understand what “Beta” means and the dumb public — especially the dumb Apple public — can’t deal with an Apple product unless and until it its baked to perfection.
Let’s start first by noting that the vast majority of people who have voiced themselves on Siri have expressed a positive reaction: Exhibit A being the overwhelmingly positive stream of tweets on Siri. Here is what the latest search results (as of the time of writing) gives me:
If Siri were the unmitigated disaster that Honan claims it to be — “a lie” — a real backlash would have ensued. Remember, we are dealing with a consumer base that expressed raw, black outrage when the iPhone 4’s antaena didn’t function perfectly when the device was held in a certain way. The Apple fan base is loyal, to be sure, but it can turn into the fearsome opposition if it feels crossed.
Second: the expectation that Siri must be perfect before releasing it to the public is just plain silly. No software on this planet is perfect — ever — let alone software that is taking head on two of the most complex problems in Artificial Intelligence (Speech Recognition and Natural Language Processing). Why should Siri be singled out and expected to perform flawlessly? Moreover, ask yourself: was the iPhone really that perfect, that awesome and that life-changing of a product when it came out? The answer is: No, it was not — not by a long shot. I remember how for a whole year, I had no more than half a dozen apps that I cared about on my home screen and how I hated the fact that I had to deal with the awful soft keypad (which remains equally awful to this day) for typing my email. Aside from looking up the weather, the stocks, my Gmail (my Calendar being as useless to me then as it is now, my work calendar being tied to Microsoft Outlook), and playing my music — and this only when I had to, given that my iPod gave me more control of how I listened to my music than the soft iPhone Music App — I just had no real use for my iPhone. I still sent email and checked my calendar using my blackberry, and I listened to my music using my iPod. And oh, yeah — my iPhone sucked at making phone calls too….
Which brings me to my third point: Honan lists a litany of shortcomings of Siri and describes these shortcomings in tragic tones, as if they were fatal sins that will condemn Siri to eternal damnation. But in fact, every single one of those “fatal sins” is nothing more than a simple blemish that will vanish as Siri matures: (1) Speech Recognition is certainly not perfect, but it will — and inexorably does — get better, day after day, thanks to the fact that Apple got Siri in the hands of the the dumb public so that they could submit the training samples that the speech recognition software needs to evolve its model; (2) Siri is not smart enough yet to know that asking it for the fastest way to an emergency room is more or less the same as asking it for the fastest way to a hospital — but getting it to be smarter in that way is now a trivial problem because, again, the application is in the hands of the dumb public, so that now Siri’s designers and developers can learn the many ways that people ask for medical help; (3) Siri doesn’t know how to give the user directions from one location to another — something that GPS Apps have been able to do for years now…. But then again, how many other “obvious” things do you want Siri to be able to do? The answer is: you want it to do EVERYTHING — from giving you directions, to doing the dozens of things you may want to do on facebook, or twitter, or LinkedIn, or Hulu, or Netflix, or PayPal, or Gmail, etc. Is it really reasonable to expect Siri be able to do everything under the sun? The answer is that it won’t — it will never be able to all the “obvious” things your want it to do — ever — let alone during its maiden release. The universe is just too vast for it to do it by itself.
In any case, one thing is for sure: thank God Apple decided to put Siri in the Cloud, so that it can learn and get better with every one of the millions of interactions it engages in every day. To be sure, it sucks and is a major bummer that I can’t use Siri when the network is down — but you know what, aside for playing music, my iPhone is more or less useless to me anyway when the network is down….
Siri is definitely flawed and in many cases outright dumb: it does not take full advantage of context; the fact that it does not launch Apps is very frustrating; and the fact that it treats complex requests rather primitively (takes only the first request it understands and ignores the rest) is disappointing. But the key two things to keep in mind about Siri are the following: (1) Siri is a better voice and speech assistant than anything out there — and better by a good mile; and (2) Siri is an evolving product — evolving as a child would evolve as it learns about how to interact with people. And just like we all knew that the iPhone was a revolution in the making and that we had to put up with its frustrating shortcomings in its inchoate stages, so must we all be equally patient and tip our hat to Apple for starting yet another revolution with Siri. Siri is — just like the iPhone was — a worthy cause.
Siri Notes 